Dominican Republic

Aracelis owns a hair salon in Santo Domingo. Like all the other owners of the nearly 20,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Dominican Republic, she dreams about making her business thrive. SMEs in this Caribbean country employ more than 500,000 people, representing a key driver of economic growth. To make their businesses grow and achieve their goals, all business owners need one crucial ingredient: money.

Countries with the best education outcomes are those in which society places high value on the teaching profession. That value is reflected in the relationship between the state, society, and the teacher; in the support given to teachers (including reasonable salaries), in the trust placed in them; and in the recognition bestowed upon them by society, parents, and the community as well as the value they place on the tremendous responsibility that they bear.

It is well established in the economic literature that it’s the rich who benefit from the lion’s share of energy subsidies. Yet, it is often the poor and vulnerable who protest loudly against these reforms. Why does this happen? What are we missing?

Photo: Andy Shuai Liu/World Bank
Invented over a century ago for exploring mountainous regions, aerial cable cars have recently made an appearance in several big cities, where they are being used as an alternative to conventional urban transport modes. This technology uses electrically-propelled steel cables to move suspended cars (or cabins) between terminals at different elevation points.

The tipping point. The emergence of cable cars in urban transport is fairly new. Medellín, Colombia pioneered the use of cable cars for urban transport when it opened its first “Metrocable” line in 2004. Since then, urban cable cars have grown in popularity around the world, with recent projects in Latin America (Rio de Janeiro, Caracas, Guayaquil, Santo Domingo, La Paz, and Medellín), Asia (Yeosu, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong), Africa (Lagos, Constantine), and Europe (London, Koblenz, Bolzano). Cable cars can be an attractive urban transport solution to connect communities together when geographical barriers such as hills and rivers make other modes infeasible.

Advocacy around open government reforms to date has largely revolved around the intrinsic value of transparency, accountability, and participation. In a resource-constrained environment, development practitioners, policy makers, and citizens increasingly have to be more judicious. Adopting new methods or tools – such as open contracting mechanisms, open data dashboards and participatory budgeting – is not free. How can we measure the instrumental value of open government reforms?

In the Dominican Republic, more than one third of young women aged between 18 and 22 get married or form an informal union before turning 18, while one in five has already given birth before reaching that age. Child marriage is not only a moral issue; it also has economic impacts for the country.

Results-based financing can force conversation to focus on developing a theory of change that starts with results. (Photo: Minna Mattero / World Bank)

We just got back from Nepal to see how results-based financing has, or hasn’t, changed the way their education system functions. Over lunch, we asked our counterparts at the Ministry of Education: “What’s been different since the introduction of results-based financing?” Their response: “Oh, we just pay more attention to the indicators.” While this may sound peripheral, it speaks to the power of RBF.

When seeking to engage private partners, one thinks of large, high-cost national infrastructure projects. But subnational governments are also effectively partnering with the private sector by leveraging assets, rethinking “infrastructure,” and establishing mechanisms to give long-term security.

Some Latin American governments are capitalizing on legislative frameworks for Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs)—in some cases tailoring laws for subnational use, and using experience gained from large-scale national projects.